The Scribe is quite positive that had you only heard about it as he had, even with the details elaborated, not only by Peter, who was conservatism itself in his every statement, but by Miss Felicia as well—­who certainly ought to have known—­you would not have believed it possible until you had seen it.  Even then you would have had to drop into one of Miss Felicia’s cretonne-upholstered chairs—­big easy-chairs that fitted into every hollow and bone in your back—­looked the length of the uneven porch, run your astonished eye down the damp, water-soaked wooden steps to the moist brick pavement below, and so on to the beds of crocuses blooming beneath the clustering palms and orange trees, before you could realize (in spite of the drifting snow heaped up on the door-steps of her house outside—­some of it still on your shoes) that you were in Miss Felicia’s tropical garden, attached to Miss Felicia’s Geneseo house, and not in the back yard of some old home in the far-off sunny South.

It was an old story, of course, to Peter, who had the easy-chair beside me, and so it was to Morris, who had helped Miss Felicia carry out so Utopian a scheme, but it had come to me as a complete surprise, and I was still wide-eyed and incredulous.

“And what keeps out the cold?” I asked Morris, who was lying back blowing rings into the summer night, the glow of an overhead lantern lighting up his handsome face.

“Glass,” he laughed.

“Where?”

“There, just above the vines, my dear Major,” interrupted Miss Felicia, pointing upward.  “Come and let me show you my frog pond—­ “and away we went along the brick paths, bordered with pots of flowers, to a tiny lake covered with lily-pads and circled by water-plants.

“I did not want a greenhouse—­I wanted a back yard,” she continued, “and I just would have it.  Holker sent his men up, and on three sides we built a wall that looked a hundred years old—­ but it is not five—­and roofed it over with glass, and just where you see the little flight of stairs is the heat.  That old arbor in the corner has been here ever since I was a child, and so have the syringa bushes and the green box next the wall.  I wanted them all the year round—­not just for three or four months in the year—­ and that witch Holker said he could do it, and he has.  Half the weddings in town have been begun right on that bench, and when the lanterns are lighted and the fountain turned on outside, no gentleman ever escapes.  You and Peter are immune, so I sha’n’t waste any of my precious ammunition on you.  And now what will you wear in your button-hole—­a gardenia, or some violets?  Ruth will be down in a minute, and you must look your prettiest.”

But if the frog pond, damp porch and old-fashioned garden had come as a surprise, what shall I say of the rest of Miss Felicia’s house which I am now about to inspect under Peter’s guidance.